I appeared earlier this afternoon on RT (formerly "Russia Today"), an English-language Russian news service seen in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Despite yesterday's six-months-late admission from the New York Times that they were repeatedly bamboozled by the Rightwing con-artists who produced deceptively edited hit videos in order to take down ACORN (which they successfully did), U.S. television --- including those so-called "liberal" bastions like CNN and MSNBC --- don't seem to much care that the entire thing was a hoax from the jump. At least they've yet to cover it, while RT has done so with at least three live hits over the past 24 hours.

Yesterday, my colleague and friend David Swanson was also a guest on RT to discuss the ACORN issue, as was nationally syndicated radio host Thom Hartmann. Both of those short segments are posted below and well worth watching...

It is beyond SHAMEFUL and OUTRAGEOUS that those Americans who wish to learn the truth must now go to RUSSIAN!!!! news outlets and Scottish and Irish newspapers in order to escape the Matrix.
(If you are one of the unfortunate- who have not seen the movie, I urge you to see The Matrix.)
Here is an absolutely frightening story to make your hair stand on end from Scottish newspapers:http://www.heraldscotlan...stination-iran-1.1013151

Is it any wonder all Americans are so ignorant?
David Swanson's comments about our national media are spot-on! They are ALL complicit.

Thom Hartmann seems to have fallen for parts of the scam himself and doesn't have all his facts straight. Thanks for the great work you've been doing on this, Brad.

This really should be a wake-up call for progressives and reformers trying to work within the system. It is important to understand just how much power the rich and their front companies (corporations) really have in this country. The media alone can make or break candidates and elected officials simply by slanting their coverage. They do something quite similar to what O'Keefe did, in that the candidates they don't like get negative coverage while the ones they do like get positive coverage, and it is all highly edited.

ACORN was one of many reform groups trying to work within our system. The real problem, in my opinion, is that our system is not a democratic form of government. So when people vote, it isn't just that their votes might not be counted, might be miscounted, or can be Constitutionally nullified by the Electoral College, Congress, or the Supreme Court, but that by voting, citizens are granting their "consent of the governed," as the Declaration of Independence called it, to an undemocratic form of government, thereby legitimizing it and agreeing to be governed by it.

The reason that ACORN was so necessary, and why in Venezuela poverty is decreasing while poverty is rising in the U.S., is because we don't have a democratic form of government. We have a Constitutional oligarchy. I think that rather than consenting to it and hoping that it might stop the torture, wars of aggression, wars of aggression, and other unpopular policies, we should be opposing it and insisting on a real voice in government, not just a symbolic vote.

The real reason that Blackwater/Xe, despite horrendous atrocities, remains in business while ACORN went bankrupt (as Hartmann alluded to), is that Xe is a tool of the oligarchy. When ACORN registered poor people to vote, they has no idea that Clinton would push through GATT and NAFTA, that the Democrats would vote for everything Bush wanted and even take impeachment off the table, and that Obama would expand the wars of aggression and the bailouts to the tune of trillions of dollars more than Bush had. Most of them hoped they were voting for change and reform, when they were actually consenting the status quo and agreeing to be governed by it.

Defense corporations have been convicted of defrauding the government many times and still get multi-billion dollar contracts, ACORN did nothing wrong and was driven out of existence. In a democracy or a republic, things like that wouldn't happen because power would be vested in the hands of the citizens rather than in the hands of unaccountable corporate puppets who rarely even pretend to represent their constituents.

ACORN best virtue was that it wasn't afraid of empowering ordinary people. There's another scam that FOX News and the corporate media are pushing, which is that if we had a democratic form of government right-wingers like the Tea Party might have power. They're actually a very small (but very hate-filled and violent) minority, and most of them wouldn't be active at all unless they were incited and paid to do so. The right uses the mainstream media as a megaphone to attempt to appear larger than it really is.

The rich own the corporations, the corporations own the media and the politicians, and the voters don't seem to mind. I recently had a Progressive Democratic chide me because he felt that I was making democracy into a religion. He, on the other hand, apparently doesn't believe in democracy, or doesn't think it is very important. And he's running for office as a Progressive Democrat. Democracy? Who needs it? Just vote or run for office and let the torture, the wars of aggression, the bailouts, and the rigged elections continue. If you're a candidate, you can then speak out against everything your colleagues do (before caving and joining them so as not to lose your seniority and committee assignments), and if you're a voter you can then petition your "elected" officials the same way that the subjects of any tyrant can always petition their ruler. What does it matter if you don't have a real voice in government, as long as you can vote to consent to and legitimize the oligarchy and even strive to become a part of the oligarchy?

Those who know that our Constitution was constructed so that the popular vote would not be the final say if the oligarchy objected to it, should stop encouraging people to vote. Those who don't yet understand the problem, should study the Constitution. We can't hold our representives accountable because we were never meant to have that power. Our votes can go uncounted because they were never meant to be the deciding factor.

Times 'coverage' (Thursday, Mar. 25, 2010) in a Breitbart puff piece called Citizen Breitbart: "On its first day of business, Big Government produced a scoop: undercover filmmakers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles — the would-be Borats of the right — had shot videos that appeared to show workers at ACORN, a liberal organization that lobbies for affordable housing, offering tips on how to open a brothel."

CNN's coverage yesterday was predictably lame as well (and completely wrong, of course).
I have to agree with the above commenter that Hartmann doesn't seem to be fully apprised of how this hit job seems to have been 100% contrived out of whole cloth. That said, I am a big fan of Thom Hartmann. I hope someone calls him on it today on the show.

The video is loading too slowly, so I'll comment anyway, despite the risk of ignorance.

The intro says the NYTimes was "bamboozled by the Rightwing con-artists...." Of course, the NYTimes was not bamboozled. The NYTimes owners and/or editors certainly knew they were lying from the very beginning.

As other commenters have said, the major media are liars for the criminals in our government and the owners of top corporations, especially banksters. We have known this for years, though most Americans remain under-educated, uninformed, and misinformed --- which is what the criminals want.

On a POSITIVE note, we have a historic opportunity now. Thanks to the Internet and also to a growing mass of voters waking up to the 2-Party fraud.

Please allow me to offer a way for us to win in 2012 and then to govern. We can achieve a true representative democracy. Sincerely, it's surprisingly simple.